Internet: the early years

Jimmy Wales Founder of Wikipedia
One thing that was a pretty big deal was the first time I got into an email conversation with someone in Australia. That boggled my mind, because at the time I was living in Alabama, I'd never even been on an aeroplane, and the fact that I could communicate with someone in Australia, albeit once a day because we slept on different schedules . . . that was a bit overwhelming, and gave a hint of the times to come.
Arianna Huffington Huffington Post Editor
Beyond email, my first real involvement with the internet was in 1998 when I launched ariannaonline.com for my columns, books, and projects such as the Partnership for a Poll-Free America, which I started with Harry Shearer to get people to hang up on pollsters. I saw right away that the internet was a really cool way to connect with my readers and build a community. The power of the internet as a real force in journalism hit home for me in December 2002 when bloggers took hold of racist remarks senate majority leader Trent Lott had made at a little-covered event, ran with the story, developed it, linked to each other, advanced it further and stayed with it until Lott had to resign. It was an "aha!" moment.

Tim Dowling Guardian journalist
The first time I tried to access the internet I failed: I was halfway through a laborious signup process when my laptop died. I had to go back to the shop and exchange it. At some point the following evening – this is somewhere in the middle of 1996 – I found myself online. There was that strange sequence of dial-up chirps, that clotted whoosh of white noise, and finally an abrupt silence. A woman's voice said, "Welcome to CompuServe." Then she said, "You have mail". It was an email saying: "Welcome to Compuserve."

Three months later I got another email, from a woman in Kentucky. It said, "Hi! Guess what! This is my very first email!!!!" It was clear that she thought I was someone else, so I didn't answer, but through her mistake I became connected to a group of people from the midwest who shared a fondness for the Reply All button. Some days I received five or six emails, telling me that Bob and Suzanne were relocating to Denver or inviting me to Patti's bridal shower.

This carried on for three years, by which time I was actually receiving emails from people I knew. I still miss them, my close-knit little gang of complete strangers, just as I miss the woman who said, "You have mail". The Compuserve Classic dial-up service was only retired in June, though I hadn't used it for nearly a decade by then. In some mysterious way, however, it carries on. It must do, because it is still taking £6 out of my bank account every month.

Thomas Gesenemer Managing partner, Blue State Digital
My earliest encounter with the Internet was via AOL dial-up at super-slow speeds from my childhood home in Pennsylvania. It was on a Tandy 1000 computer, just like this: bit.ly/4wJC8y. I was forced to dial long-distance to connect as the nearest AOL server station was 200 miles away. After a $350 phone bill in the first month my parents cancelled the account and removed the computer from my bedroom. How far we've come.

Zoe Margolis Blogger
My first memory of going on the internet was in late 1998, when I was a film student and I visited the university library to do some research. A fellow student introduced me to the web and its advantages. My entire approach to research changed: I began using the internet daily. Things may have been relatively basic on the web back then, and there were some complications – I remember one embarrassing moment where, in full view of everyone in the library, a cacophony of explicitly pornographic "pop-up" boxes began appearing all over my computer screen after I had clicked on a (non-sexual, I swear) link. I ended up having to unplug the entire thing from the mains. Thankfully we have better methods of dealing with such situations now: praise be Adblock Plus.

Alan Meckler Creator of Internet World
In 1990 I was publishing technology information for research librarians worldwide. At a gathering I was running in Washington DC, a librarian from the University of Maryland mentioned that the internet would be the next big thing for libraries. The internet at this time did not include the web – it was text only. Within a few months I started a print newsletter for librarians and educators called Internet World. As far as I know this was the first commercial venture related to the internet.

Derren Brown Illusionist
When I was at university, my flatmate got me hooked on going to the "computer room" of an evening and sending messages back and forth with some people that I somehow got connected with. As I remember, there was a list of user-names and you could start sending and receiving text. It was called Kermit and it was so addictive, especially being able to present a kind of heightened version of myself.

I look back with embarrassment; I imagine I embodied the opinionated, joyless arrogance of many of the people who nowadays populate online discussions. To think I now use Twitter avidly is extraordinary to me.

Julie Pankhurst Founder of Friends Reunited
For me, one of the most powerful sites that I used in the early days was one called www.phonenumbers.net – from this site you could access phonebooks from all over the world. It was through this site that after previously many years of trying, I managed in a weekend to track down and talk to my family in Denmark, whom I had previously never been in contact with.

I remember being very proud of Friends Reunited as, before its creation, I could see many messages on various messageboards asking for help tracing down long-lost friends – it was quite unlikely that sought-for friends would ever see these messages.

The Friends Reunited site was designed around a well-structured database, which contained all the school and pupil related information in one location. Within two weeks of putting the site live we had reunited two old school friends, showing the absolute power of holding databases on the internet.

Alan Rusbridger Guardian editor
In October 1985 I set off to cover a royal tour of Australia armed with a Tandy 100 and two rubber cups. The Tandy was about the size of a phone directory and was powered by four AA batteries. It was rumoured that you could use it to send a story back to London without phoning bored copy-takers in the middle of the night. The procedure involved setting up an account with the local phone company and routing extremely long strings of packet-switching code via a third party in an office in Fleet Street. The rubber cups went over each end of the phone and, after punching in dozens of numbers, the copy was on its way at - ooh - about 100 words a minute. It made a funny high-pitched gargle as it went. Life would never be the same again . . .

Camilla Wright Founder of Popbitch
I mainly remember how slow the internet was, and you could only do really simple things – it was probably the mid-90s when I got internet access at home, and it was a really slow dial-up connection. It's hard to think now that trying to listen to music or watch videos was so tortuous back then.

Tom Watson Blogging MP
The "million-dollar home page" was the moment that web got really exciting for me. Alex Tew's money-making scheme to get him through university undermined about every business assumption in the publishing world. His site was cheap and cheerful with no branding or marketing or purpose. All you did was purchase advertising at a dollar a pixel. And everyone saw the adverts because their friends had emailed the link. Alex's idea went viral without a newspaper or television to distribute it to the masses. If only Jan Moir understood the significance of the million-dollar home page, she wouldn't be Twitter's latest take-down.

Sarah Beeny Founder of Mysinglefriend and Tepilo
In the beginning, probably about 15 years ago now, I mainly used the internet for emails and booking holidays. I have sort of fallen into my internet businesses. My sites were born out of not being able to understand why nobody else had done them before, why there wasn't a dating site where people could add their friends, and why most sites that help people sell their properties weren't very user-friendly (and I couldn't understand why people were still paying estate agents).

Jeff Jarvis Journalist and blogger
In 1994 Rupert Murdoch bought Delphi, the first online service to give consumers access to the internet, and I moved there from my perch as TV critic for TV Guide to head up its content and community. When I arrived, I found a disaster. Internet access was limited to text, which was cool for the time, but ugly. Delphi was trying and failing to create it own GUI (graphical user interface) so it could be the next Prodigy or AOL. Murdoch family members were running loose.

Then someone showed us the Mosaic browser and my head exploded. I saw the power of the unlimited link – a power I have yet to fully comprehend. I urged Delphi to dump its GUI and go to the web. But that was the least of the company's problems, so I quit. News Corp soon sank millions into the unsung internet flop Iguide (a foreshadowing of its MySpace problem).

Today, 40 years after the birth of the internet and 15 years after the introduction of the commercial browser in October 1994, News Corp is still trying to figure out the internet. So are newspaper and media companies. And in fairness, so am I.

Jack Schofield Guardian computer editor
My first text-only internet access wasn't particularly exciting, but things changed when the Mosaic web browser arrived, and I was enthused by a visit to Alan Meckler's Internet World show in London in 1994. I knew the web was going to change the world, of course: I just hadn't realised how many other people had similar or even better visions of the future. What made the dream a reality was the arrival of cheap broadband roughly a decade later. When the internet was dial-up, you were always aware of going online, and how much it cost. Nowadays I'm online almost all the time. It's only when I get on a tube, for example, I notice it's not there.

CREDIT: www.theguardian.com